MicrosoftI am extremely disappointed with this announcement, and I've taken the time to create a comparison list between Microsoft Entra ID and the existing features in Azure AD. This way, I can clearly illustrate how little value Microsoft Entra ID actually brings.
To begin with, it's worth noting that we now have three different places to manage identities: Azure AD, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, and Entra ID. This redundancy is a major concern.
Let's focus on the Entra options as an example. The top menus are as follows:
1. Identity: This is essentially a shortcut to Azure AD. All the sub-items in this view merely redirect to the settings available in Azure AD.
2. Protection: Once again, there's nothing new here. All the settings already exist in the Azure AD view.
3. Identity Governance: Yet again, all these settings are duplicated in the Azure AD view. Seriously, why?
4. Verifiable credentials: Not sure what the use case is here. I haven't spent much time on this one.
5. Permission Management: Finally, we come across a genuinely new feature. This is the only reason I would consider using Entra.
6. Global Secure Access (preview): Here we have the last new feature you've introduced. It seems to be no more than two conditional access policies, an app proxy, and another client for endpoints. I haven't delved too deeply into this one, so I'm uncertain about its use case.
So, for Verifiable Credentials, Permission Management, and Global Secure Access, you've decided that another identity portal was necessary. We all know this is just the beginning. There will be no changes now, but next year or the year after, you'll likely begin updating existing services or worse, introducing new services under a new name. Once again, I implore you to stop this unnecessary duplication.
